


Sue Perkins's commitment phobia and general lesbianism.

by emef



Category: British Comedy RPF, The Supersizers RPF
Genre: F/M, Kissing, Truth or Dare, one-sided romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-06
Updated: 2014-09-06
Packaged: 2018-02-16 08:23:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2262696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emef/pseuds/emef
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which there is no magical <s>healing</s> heterosexuality-inducing cock.</p><p> <em>She describes their relationship as "will they won't they... they won't" to the media. She is thin and dark and smiles easily and she's always quicker than him, taking the first drink and getting the first laugh. She’s taller than him and she thinks she looks better with glasses, but it isn't true. She's beautiful.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Sue Perkins's commitment phobia and general lesbianism.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [marginaliana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/marginaliana/gifts).



> Thanks to Missmollyetc and Charloween for beta. Extra thanks to Charloween for the missing scene.

London  
November 2010  
Planning meeting for Giles and Sue’s Royal Wedding

Giles once heard Sue describe him as a ‘tantalizing mixture of infuriating and charming.’ He didn’t think much of the description at the time, but sometimes the words sort of lurch through his mind, like a coin flipping over and over and over. Infuriating and charming. Infuriating and charming. Charming.

“Don’t be overly submissive now,” she tells him when they’re filming the Eighties episode, and he wonders if she knows he baited her into saying it. Is baiting her into abusing him infuriating, or charming? Depends if she thinks he likes it or not.

She’s funnier than him and she knows it. He sees her look at him and interrupt herself, like she’s trying not to outshine him _too_ much. Because, he supposes, making him look inadequate is good television, but humiliating him is just cruel? Giles likes to think that there is a tacit understanding not to mention it. They both know she is more compelling, but there is no need to dwell on it.

Journalists point it out constantly though. The Guardian once wrote that Sue “exhibits a depth of knowledge about history and the arts almost equal to that which [Giles] imagines he possesses.” _That_ should have taught Giles to stop typing “Sue Perkins” into Google, particularly late at night, but Giles is incorrigible. Which is infuriating. Because Sue is right: he’s infuriating. He’s so infuriating that he infuriates himself.

He puts a post-it note on the mirror: Be more charming.

“Wanker,” he tells the mirror.

("Very perceptive," the mirror replies, though Giles can't hear it.)

It’s 11:45 and he can’t find his hair products. He’s rummaging through every single drawer and every single cabinet, but they are nowhere to be found. But he has to go meet Sue and Alannah for a lunch meeting. He looks in the mirror again. The light fixtures have finally been changed in his dressing room, and now he can see all the dust accumulating where the char doesn’t catch it. He can also see his aging face in all its jowled glory. Never mind his hair - is that really what his chin looks like? Christ, he can’t go outside like this.

He tries blow-drying his hair, as a last effort, but that just makes it worse. “Happy now?” he asks his reflection. “You’re embarrassing me.”

("You're doing just fine on your own," his mirror mutters, glaring at the dust hiding in its frame. )

Giles and Sue give interviews together sometimes, and he usually makes the mistake of reading them. Obligatory mentions of his rage episodes and lack of self-control, but never anything bad about Sue. The best things journalists can say about him is that he is ‘good-looking’, but the descriptions of Sue are lengthy, dithyrambic, catalogues of praise. She is successful, naturally talented, quick-witted, affable, fearless. _Astonishing._

She describes their relationship as "will they won't they... they won't" to the media. She is thin and dark and smiles easily and she's always quicker than him, taking the first drink and getting the first laugh. She’s taller than him and she thinks she looks better with glasses, but it isn't true. She's beautiful.

“Morning!” He calls out, arriving at the meeting only three minutes late.

The meeting is in a tolerable restaurant. One of those places where several of the dishes are reliably delicious, but the décor is preposterous - great big tree trunks in the middle of the dining room - and the coffee isn’t good. It isn’t terrible, but it isn’t good. Why do some restaurants put no effort into their coffee? So often, coffee is the last thing one tastes in a meal. Surely restauranteurs would want the last item in the meal to be _particularly_ delicious.

“Bloody Hell, Giles, you’ve turned into a fluffy baby raven,” Sue says.

He hangs his head in embarrassment. “An evil spirit invaded my home and stole all my hair products.”

“Poor dear,” Sue says, but she puts both hands on his head and ruffles his hair. Then Alannah hands them both contracts and glasses of wine, and reads them the final proposal. “Giles and Sue assume the roles of a modern prince and his princess-to-be as they agonise over every step of the wedding planning process, from choosing the dress to arguing over the vows. Along the way they don historical costumes to step back in time and draw inspiration from past royal couples.”

After the main course, they huddle together at the table to watch bits from the first and second series, while Alannah comments. They watch the bit in the Ancient Rome episode, where Sue dressed up as Cleopatra and rolled out of a carpet to ‘seduce’ Giles’s Julius Ceasar. Giles is surprised by the strength of his reaction to it, to just the footage of it. He sits there watching Sue joke her way out of the seduction scene, and he feels like a giddy idiot, willing the scene to end before he gives himself away.

Giles remembers telling her chat-up lines that day, off-camera, to get a rise out of her. She turned him down in increasingly disparaging ways, but somehow he never felt rejected. That faintly endeared, faintly exasperated, look on her face had been worth it.

Alannah shows them the fencing bit from the Regency episode. The day they filmed that had been drisly and grey, Giles remembers, and he’d been surprised to see Sue appear in britches and an undershirt. _You’re dressed as a boy_ , he hadn’t said, and then she’d turned out to be more proficient with an épée than she had any right to be.

“Obviously royal brides wouldn’t be duelling -“ Alannah is saying.

Giles pictures Kate Middleton involved in some kind of Milady-from-the-Three-Musketeers scenario. “Imagine the ratings, though.”

“- but we were thinking of working some fencing in somehow..." she says, looking at Sue.

Sue says nothing.

“I did hear of a princess in Lichtenstein who duelled topless.” Giles comments.

Alannah chokes on her coffee. “What?”

“Pauline Metternich I think, just before the turn of the century. 1890-something. I could’ve sworn I’ve seen an illustration somewhere.”

Sue smirks at him. “Your pornography interests are so unexpected, Coren.”

The thing with Sue is that she pushes his buttons.

“Right,” Alannah says, as she starts playing another clip. “I have to go in a minute, but look at this.”

The seventies episode had been the one where Giles started having Thoughts about Sue. The sight of her shoving asparagus down that girl - Emily, had it been? - down Emily’s throat had been too much for him, and that image had stayed with him for weeks. He’d fantasized about having that girl, fantasized about it a _lot_ , and somehow Sue always showed up in those fantasies. He kept seeing her, in his mind’s eye, shoving _other things_ down that girl’s throat. And he kept seeing Sue grabbing that girl’s head, for some reason, and telling her to get down on her knees. Or sometimes - sometimes Sue was telling _Giles_ to get down on his knees.

Those thoughts kept him busy for a while, all the way through to the end of filming series one. And he’d gotten curious after that; started wanting to know things. What did the first girl Sue had ever kissed look like, he wanted to know? Did she ever fancy a man? Did she mean it when she told interviewers that she’s always fancied him a bit, or was she just playing it up, telling them what they wanted to hear?

He asks women personal questions all the time, really, but not Sue. All he knows about her is what she volunteers for the camera. He thinks about asking, but he's not sure what personal questions would mean to her.

He doesn't know Sue, he realizes. Would it be different if he felt like he knew her? If he felt like he knew what she was really thinking, most of the time? Does anyone really know her, he wonders?

"Don't worry, love. It happens to all of us,” Alannah says, when Sue has gone to fetch her coat.

"Sorry?" He asks.

"Sue.” Alannah gives him a sad smile. "It happens to all of us, Giles,” she repeats, before turning to walk away.

"What, even Stephen Fry?" he calls after her.

*

When he goes home, Giles pitches forward onto his couch, and falls asleep. The meeting was fine, the proposal for the royal wedding special was fine, the conditions, remuneration and stipend schemes were fine. Everything was fine. He just needs a bit of a sleep, that's all. 

Six hours later, it's dark outside and he feels heavy and stupid. He was having a dream in which he was going down on Sue to prove that his cunnilingus was as good as any lesbian’s. “Bloody Hell,” he tells the ceiling, before trying to stand up and failing. His brain doesn’t quite follow the movement; he does not know where he is. The carpet looks terribly cheap from this close. He’s wondering what he was thinking when he purchased it when he realizes that his phone is falling out of his pocket. He catches it before it hits the floor.

He half-sits, half-lies there, with his phone in his hand, for a full thirty seconds. He stares at a dust mote floating over his coffee table. Then he dials.

She answers after the first ring. “Giles? What’s going on?”

“Have a drink with me.” He doesn’t know where or how. He’ll think about that later, if she says yes.

“What, now?”

Probably? “Yes?”

“I’m still in London, so… Are you all right?

“I’m fine. Tell me where you are.”

*

Sue ends up giving him an address, but she’s nowhere to be seen when Giles gets there. He doesn't know the place, but he likes it immediately. It’s nice. A vinegary chips smell wafts in from the kitchen, there’s interesting music playing, and it doesn’t make him feel old.

> _Basic human needs are. Just below the surface._  
>  _Animal desire. I can hardly wait to fall down beside you_  
>  _collapse from a night of exhaustion so burning so dirty and_  
>  _true. Burning so dirty and dirty and true._  
> 

Sue strides in a moment later, in jeans, a white shirt, a waistcoat, and a tie, and flops on to a chair. Giles wordlessly hands her a pint. Her hair is fluffy, and she smells like autumn. She looks wonderful.

"What's on your mind, my dear onscreen brother-husband?" She asks, once she’s drunk half her glass.

"You are, Perkins."

She raises an eyebrow. “Am I."

"Yes. It has occurred to me that you and I do not know each other." They’re getting married for a bloody royal wedding special, aren’t they? Surely Giles should know… things. Of a thing-like nature.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I hardly know you,” Giles says, mock-genially. “- or, that is, I hardly know the real you. This state of affairs is unacceptable, if we are to be wed."

Sue catches on, and puts on her BBC voice. “Yes, yes, I see what you mean. Intimate knowledge of each other's hopes and dreams is essential," she says, "to the success of a television marriage."

"Precisely."

"Well then, Coren, out with it,” Sue leans forward, gesturing with her glass. “Hopes and dreams in chronological order! Chop chop.”

Giles hadn’t thought this through. “Bloody hell, I don't know."

"All right, then, an easier one." Sue moves right along, deadpan, like this is an utterly unsurprising conversation. "You have a million dollars and only twelve hours to spend it. What do you do."

"Buy a dozen suits and spend the rest at the blackjack table."

Sue winces. "Why must your hopes and dreams be written by Ian Fleming?”

"Those aren't my hopes and dreams!” Giles protests. “That's just money!"

"Fine, fine. What are your hopes and dreams, then?"

"No no, you've asked me a question already. It's my turn now."

“Oh, are we taking turns?” Sue asks, still in her BBC voice. Earnest, inquisitive, non-threatening. Funny, but like she’s using humour to distract, rather than to attract attention.

“Don’t distract me!”

“What?”

It’s like being in another country. Like those moments of being abroad and suddenly realizing that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, familiar to cling to. Giles has lost his hold on the conversation - on the entire situation, even - but he can’t think how to get it back. He’s alone with Sue, which never happens, really. There aren’t any crew members or cameras here, not even a computer for recording a video diary, and he can’t just give Alannah a call because she doesn’t even know they’re here.

Before he’s had time to think, Giles blurts out, “truth or dare?"

Sue chokes on her drink. “What?”

“Come on, Perkins,” he says, with more chutzpah than he feels. “Truth or dare!”

Sue glances around at the people at the surrounding tables, and then at the door (oh god), and then back at Giles. She blinks, like she can’t believe what she’s about to say. "Truth."

“Have you ever accidentally stolen a pint glass."

Sue stares at him for a moment, and then bursts out laughing. “I have, actually.”

Nearly everyone Giles knows has walked out of a pub still holding their glass, which either says something about the type of person he associates with, or about the paltry state of security in London pubs.

He raises his glass. “To stolen pints.”

“To stolen pints,” Sue answers.

When they’ve drained their glasses, Giles tells her, “it's your turn now.”

“Oh right,” Sue says, and looks down at her glass. “Truth or dare.”

“Truth.”

“Would you rather give up cheese, or oral sex?”

“Fuck a duck!” Giles exclaims. What a horrible set of options. “Cheese,” he says, confidently. “Truth or dare?”

“Truth.”

“Would you rather…” He grapples for ideas. “Would you rather be sexually attracted to inanimate objects, or to food?”

Sue thinks about it. “Inanimate objects, I think. Truth or dare?”

They keep going for four more pints. The world slowly narrows down to just the two of them, sitting in slightly sticky chairs and giggling like they’re schoolchildren starved for attention. They make each other write things on twitter, increasingly absurd things, and Sue makes Giles chat up an empty chair.

“Go on, Coren. Show me how you woo the unresponsive masses.”

The chair is upholstered in red leather and clearly older and wiser than Giles because it does not respond to his advances, no matter how much effort he puts into it. In retaliation, Giles makes Sue read the lyrics to Ke$ha’s ‘Tik Tok’ to it, to see if the chair will be swayed by american confidence.

“Such a resolutely aloof chair,” Sue says, when she has finished the last verse. The chair remains just as emotionally unavailable as ever.

Giles burps. “Rather.”

“Right then, Coren, a last one.” Sue slurs. “Would you rather be intelligent, wise, or beautiful?"

"I thought I was already all three."

"Of course you are, darling,” she says, wobbling gently. “I was just checking on your self-esteem."

“Of course. And you? Would you rather be intelligent, wise, or beautiful?"

Sue takes just a moment too long to answer. She blinks once, twice. Then she says, “I don't know."

"Yes you do." Giles reaches up to touch her shoulder. "Come on, tell me the truth. Would you rather be intelligent, wise, or beautiful? You have to tell me, those are the rules."

Sue sighs. “I’ve changed my mind,” she says. “Dare."

She runs her hand through her hair as she says it. Her cheeks are flushed bright red, like she’s wearing stage makeup, and her glasses are askew. Her tie is loosened and the top button of her shirt is undone. She looks like an androgynous wet dream.

Sue Perkins, Giles thinks, is tall, with dark eyes and dark, short hair: the exact opposite of what he would have described as his type. And he himself isn’t just not Sue’s type - he’s isn’t even the right _gender_. But he’s tired of wondering. Always wondering.

“Kiss me,” he says.

Sue doesn't move.

Giles leans forward. “Come on, Perkins, do it. Kiss me,” he slurs, “kiss me like you mean it.”

So she does.

*

Sue just mashes her mouth over his, at first. Her mouth is soft and she breathes in and out through her nose. Giles has kissed her before, of course, and really it’s always been like this - sort of moist and weirdly standoffish.

But then Sue tilts her head, touches his cheek, and moves forward a bit from where she’s sitting. The tip of Giles’s nose bumps against her cheek; she smells like wool and cologne. He closes his eyes and kisses her back.

He reaches out to put his hand around her waist but the angle is all wrong and he flails gracelessly, hits the back of her chair, and Sue pulls back. She's going to stand up, she's leaving, she's -

She takes Giles’s hands and assertively sets them down on his knees. Then she takes a hold of his chair and pulls it - with Giles still sitting in it - towards her. And _then_ she takes off her glasses, sets them down on the table, and kisses him again.

Giles’s heart staggers.

When she pulls away, she looks at his face. There is a moment of suspense. Then, “Oh, Giles.”

He… He can’t… He doesn’t say anything for a moment, and then he launches into speech. “Wait, don’t - I - I would - Sue.” He isn’t prepared for this. “Susan,” he blurts out, “I would - I would care about you, if you just let me, if -“ He falls to his knees in front of her. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. “Sue,” he says, clutching her hands. He looks up at her then, at her _utterly horrified_ face, and he blunders on. “I don’t feel about anyone, the way I feel about you.”

“ _Giles_.” The way she looks at him like he’s breaking her heart with how pathetic he is.

“Sue, I know that sounds like a chat up line, but it isn’t.”

Sue shakes her head, _no_. She doesn’t say anything. She just squeezes her eyes shut, and drops her face into her hands.

He’s done something _horrible_. What was he thinking? He wants to take it back, wants to somehow make Sue laugh again. He really wants to somehow defuse this situation, possibly with an infuriating-yet-charming comment about her commitment phobia and general lesbianism. If he were really, really clever, he thinks, he would know the right thing to say. But he’s not. All he can do right now is stand up, pay their tab, and say, “good night.”

Sue is still sitting there, rubbing her face like she has a headache, when he says it. “Good night,” Giles repeats. She doesn’t answer.

**Author's Note:**

> And now: a missing scene!
> 
> Giles uses his connections (I'm sure he has connections) to make subtle enquiries into Sue's school and uni record. Everyone he approaches rebuffs him ("That's not legal, mate.") until eventually Sue finds out. She hands him a copy of her results going back to 11-plus, with a carefully crude remark ("here's my penis, Giles, if we're measuring I'd better see yours next") and dismissive wave. Of course her marks don't matter to her. Infuriating.


End file.
